Whose The Top Scientist?
Virgin Mobile chairman Richard Branson, announced Friday that he is offering a 25 million dollar reward to the scientist who can come up with the best way of extracting green house gases from the atmosphere. Global Warming is increasingly becoming a problem, and scientist and global officials were quoted in landmark report saying that global warming will continue for centuries, and in 100 years it will have created a far different planet. So, Branson's offer is on the table, who thinks they have the right solution, who thinks 25 million sounds pretty good, whose the top scientist?
4 comments:
Determining the solution to save the planet from global warming is quite a different task than creating the longitude and latitude grid on the planet. The goal of mapping, I imagine, was not something too many scientists were interested in. Global warming, on the other hand, is very relevant and important to today’s scientists… it’s a global problem. Yes, incentive is good and tends to produce more effort out of those striving to win the prize; but incentive is useless when everyone was already working towards the cure in the first place. There has always been incentive to reverse global warming…saving the future of the planet. I don’t think the added monetary reward will affect the scientific advancements.
Branson is doing a great thing by offering a reward to the scientist who can come up with a way of extracting greenhouse gasses from the air. If I was a scientist, the possibility of receiving 25 million dollars would give me reason enough to start researching the problem. But, this offer says something else about our population. Greenhouse gasses do not discriminate, they will hurt everyone on earth if something isn't done to prevent or remove them. Shouldn't our health and safety be enough of a reason to start fixing this problem?
Branson is definately doing a good thing by trying to come up with a solution to better extract greenhouse gases. The fact that he is offering such a huge sum of money to some one who could come up with a working method is very economically based. We know that people will do better when presented with incentives because a rational human being will always take the next step to try and make themselves better off.
It's uplifting to know that someone cares so much for the well-being of our environment that he is willing to foot a $25 million prize. Another thing to consider is that this individual probably won't benefit much from any global warming solution in his lifetime but is just that concerned for humankind.
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